More Notes from Abovegroundhttps://ronbc2.wordpress.com
A webpage dedicated to reviews of books new and old, and to essays on a variety of topics in psychology, religion, politics, science, literature, and philosophy.Thu, 01 Jun 2017 05:10:02 +0000enhourly1http://wordpress.com/https://s2.wp.com/i/buttonw-com.pngMore Notes from Abovegroundhttps://ronbc2.wordpress.com
On Inequalityhttps://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/on-inequality/
https://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/on-inequality/#commentsMon, 27 Jul 2015 00:38:09 +0000http://ronbc2.wordpress.com/?p=2083Continue reading →]]>Harry G. Frankfurt 2015

On Inequality is a curious book. For one thing, it’s based on material previously published. That’s not unusual in itself, but in this case the earlier work dates from 1987 and 1997. It’s not often that a new book in the social sciences, never mind the hard sciences, relies so comfortably on such ancient sources.

Frankfurt’s book appears to have been prompted primarily by the unexpected popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century, which makes an argument against income inequality with which Frankfurt strenuously — and repetitively — disagrees.

I’m not unsympathetic with Frankfurt’s quite narrow central thesis: “From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.” You don’t have to distribute ten jackets equally among eight people to give everyone a jacket. Point made.

Seems obvious enough, yet Frankfurt spends all of his short book making and remaking this simple point. Weren’t the original journal articles sufficient? Why go to this trouble now, unless to attempt to remedy the lack of attention paid to the point then by cashing in on the current interest piqued by Piketty?

Just after making his key assertion, Frankfurt rushes to soften the edge of his thesis: “Even if economic equality itself and as such is not important, commitment to an egalitarian economic policy might be indispensable for promoting the attainment of various desirable social and political ends. Also, the most feasible approach to reaching universal economic sufficiency might actually turn out to be, in fact, a pursuit of equality.”

In other words, even though economic equality isn’t an important goal in itself, pursuing it may help society achieve other, core goals. Even though we know that it’s neither attainable nor necessary, we should work toward it anyway because we might reach some real goals while chasing after this false one.

At this very early point, I came close to just putting the book away and moving on to something else. But it was a very short book, and I was curious to see if Frankfurt had some other, more enlightening points to make. A few passages approach the point of utility, enough so that I don’t feel that I wasted my reading time … entirely.

Frankfurt elaborates his view of the costs and benefits of working toward an unreachable and unimportant economic equality: “Economic egalitarianism distracts people from calculating their monetary requirements in the light of their own personal circumstances and needs. Rather, it encourages them to aim, misguidedly, at a level of affluence measured by a calculation in which—apart from their relative monetary situation—the specific features of their own lives play no part.”

The prevalence of egalitarian thought is damaging in another way as well. It not only tends to divert the attention of people from considerations that are of greater moral or human importance to them than the question of economic equality. It also diverts the attention of intellectuals from the quite fundamental philosophical problems of understanding just what those more important considerations are, and of elaborating—in appropriately comprehensive and perspicuous detail—a conceptual apparatus that might reliably guide and facilitate their inquiries.

Continuing more narrowly, Frankfurt argues that under some circumstances “giving additional resources to people who have less than enough of those resources, and who on that account are in serious need, may not actually improve the condition of those people at all.”

In fact, he argues, moral objections to inequality are more properly understood as objections to inadequacy: “What I believe they find intuitively to be morally objectionable in circumstances of economic inequality is not that some of the individuals in those circumstances have less money than others. Rather, it is the fact that those with less have too little.”

In principle, he argues, “The doctrines of egalitarianism and of sufficiency are logically independent: considerations that support the one cannot be presumed to provide support also for the other.”

The fundamental error of economic egalitarianism lies in supposing that it is morally important whether one person has less than another, regardless of how much either of them has and regardless also of how much utility each derives from what he has. This error is due in part to the mistaken assumption that someone who has a smaller income has more important unsatisfied needs than someone who is better off.

And if we’re going to recognize that economic equality has no “underived moral worth,” Frankfurt argues, we have to take the same attitude toward all the other social equalities.

In addition to equality of resources and equality of welfare, several other modes of equality may be distinguished: equality of opportunity, equal respect, equal rights, equal consideration, equal concern, and so on. My view is that none of these modes of equality is intrinsically valuable. Hence I maintain that none of the egalitarian ideals corresponding to them has any underived moral worth.

So we come at the end to this: “The evil does not lie in the circumstance that the inferior lives happen to be unequal to other lives. What makes it an evil that certain people have bad lives is not that some other people have better lives. The evil lies simply in the conspicuous fact that bad lives are bad.”

I don’t see much with which to disagree in Frankfurt’s rather obvious argument — other than his rush to republish it in book form while the topic has popular buzz.

]]>https://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/on-inequality/feed/4ronbck10536Shameless is as shameless doeshttps://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/shameless-is-as-shameless-does/
https://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/07/21/shameless-is-as-shameless-does/#commentsTue, 21 Jul 2015 20:44:33 +0000http://ronbc2.wordpress.com/?p=2079Continue reading →]]>Good news, Canadians! Our federal government, better known as “The Harper Government,” has sent you some of your own money!

We know that it’s “The Harper Government” (THG) because the federal Employment Minister made the announcement in a snappy, blue Conservative Party of Canada tee shirt. I hear that this shirt will replace the Maple Leaf as Canada’s official symbol if the Conservatives win again in October.

And by the most unexplainable of coincidences, the bonus cheques for a program first announced eight months ago come just weeks before the anticipated start of the federal election campaign. The credit was announced back then, but it wasn’t implemented until now, for some vague reason, so that the redistribution of taxpayer money could come not as an annual credit starting then, but as a “retroactive” cash outlay now. In other words, families are getting next year’s tax break now, as an electoral — I mean “economic” –incentive.

Since I anticipate getting a modest tax refund next April, will THG please send the “retroactive” portion of it to me now? I’d like to make a political contribution, and I could use the money.

Critics are lining up to point out the parts of the cash distribution that THG doesn’t emphasize. Among other things, the new tax rule replaces an existing tax benefit, making its net benefit hundreds of dollars a year less than it appears at first glance. It does little to help the poorest families afford child care so that both parents can keep working to feed the kids. Every family with children gets the same benefit, no matter how little or how much income the parents have. And it’s taxable, so that a good chunk of it will be clawed back next spring.

I’ve read a lot of Hedges, too often with mixed feelings. I’ve always liked his politics, but I’ve been put off by his left-evangelical tone. He can be pretty shrill, which lessens his power to convince.

In this book, in a remarkable mixing of scholarship and observation, Hedges submerges much of the personal pain so evident in books like The World As It Is.

The whole book is compelling reading, but for me, former lit teacher that I am, the best part is the beginning chapter, “Doomed Voyages,” in which Hedges engagingly weaves economic and political theory with a long discourse on the contemporary moral relevance of Moby Dick.

The similarity between our present problems and Melville’s 19th century metaphor is apt, and Hedges makes the most of it.

One of the most prescient portraits of our ultimate fate as a species is found in Herman Melville’s novel about a doomed whaling voyage, Moby-Dick. Melville paints our murderous obsessions, our hubris, our violent impulses, moral weakness, and inevitable self-destruction in his chronicle of the quest by a demented captain, Ahab, for the white whale.

Hedges makes the comparison explicit:

“Even with the flashing red lights before us, even with huge swaths of the country living in Depression-like conditions, we bow slavishly before the enticing illusion provided to us by our masters of limitless power, wealth, and technological prowess. The system, although it is killing us, is our religion.”

The rest of the book is almost as rich, combining acute political and economic analysis (backed by the writing and research of many other authors) with affecting journalistic narratives that bring to life the passions and motivations of some of the most prominent contemporary victims of state suppression.

Throughout, Hedges emphasizes the single person as the moral core of any revolutionary movement. It’s the committed individual, not the group, who is vital to the cause of redress. Wages of Rebellion is a clear call for personal radicalism.

The rebel shows us that there is no hope for correction or reversal by appealing to power . The rebel makes it clear that it is only by overthrowing traditional systems of power that we can be liberated.

Appropriately, Hedges begins each chapter with the story of an individual, a victim or a hero (often, both), whose struggles against the power of the dominant culture are both informative and inspiring.

Some of these people everyone knows well, from Daniel Ellsberg to Edward Snowden. Others, little recognized in the wider celebrity culture that distracts us — like former Quaker activist Bonnie Kerness and former Black Panther Mumia Abu-Jamal — struggle with dignity and determination to find justice for themselves and for others like them.

I’ve read a lot of Neal Stephenson, from short books like Snow Crash to the 3,000+ page, eight-book trilogy that is The Baroque Cycle. Stephenson’s Anathem is my pick for the best contemporary sci-fi/futuristic/whatever genre book. Hands down, no contest.

So I hoped that Seveneves would be almost as good. Unfortunately, for me it wasn’t.

With as few “spoilers” as possible, here are the main reasons why I didn’t like Seveneves very much.

First, I’ve become quite tired of Stephenson’s penchant for length. A very, very long story worked pretty well in Cryptonomicon, less well in Reamde, and not very well at all in Seveneves.

More than 650 pages to establish a space colony and raise an orbit. Then we go away for a few millennia and come back to cover a week or two of action in another 400 pages.

I get it that Stephenson is an uber-geek, someone who can’t imagine what too much detail could possibly be, especially on one of his favourite subjects. Here, we learn so much about orbital mechanics and space engineering that we could all get jobs with the Chinese space program.

Enough, already — the first part of the book, all 650 pages of it, details something like five key events, involving characters who, even the literal handful who actually make it to page 650, have only remotely historical influence on the 400 pages of the last section.

Second, so much of the book is spent describing hardware that even 1,000+ pages aren’t enough to get to know more than one character in any depth. It’s frustrating. All of that concentrated devotion on things and processes, and so little concern for the people served by all that technology.

Third, after I devoted so much reading time to Seveneves, it ended with a pronounced “THUD.” The last part of the book shrank so much in scale that I have to believe that I’ve missed some great thematic import here. After so many pages, would it have been so hard to supply a proper ending, one that matches the scope of the novel’s action?

Last, 650 pages on 20th century rocket science, but only a few dozen pages exploring the future society that the first part made possible? The future bits are the good part, but they’re way, way too short.

One of the great strengths of Anathem is that the visionary part is first, with the action novel at the end. By the time that we get to the big reveal and the frantic adventures that follow, we care deeply about the preservation of a culture that we know intimately, having spent hundreds of pages immersed in its many details and nuances.

In Seveneves, the big finish is a little finish, and it involves characters in whom we have generated little, if any, real emotional interest.

It’s frustrating. Parts of Seveneves‘s first act are fast-paced and engaging, and parts of the second act are fresh and thought-provoking.

Too little of both makes me regret having spent so much time reading a book that can’t seem to raise its eyes above the level of the particular page at hand and, in a word, matter.

]]>https://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/06/02/seveneves/feed/1ronbcsevenevesGuns across Americahttps://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/guns-across-america/
https://ronbc2.wordpress.com/2015/05/08/guns-across-america/#commentsSat, 09 May 2015 03:37:55 +0000http://ronbc2.wordpress.com/?p=2058Continue reading →]]>A misunderstanding of American history underlies much of the mindset — and too much of the rhetoric — of the NRA, the Tea Party, and their sympathizers.

It’s too bad that very few of these uber-patriots will hear of, much less read, a meticulously researched, absolutely persuasive book — Robert J. Spitzer’s Guns across America: Reconciling Gun Rules and Rights(Oxford, May 2015).

Spitzer traces the history of gun laws from colonial times to the present, showing unambiguously that the contemporary assertion of the historical basis for the individual’s “right to bear arms” is a baseless fantasy. In fact, as Spitzer points out, individual gun ownership was not formally judged to have any constitutional basis from the ratification of the Constitution through the end of the 20th century.

Using newly-available digital resources, Guns across America documents the range of gun restrictions following the colonial period. His survey shows that it’s not that constitutionally-guaranteed gun rights are now threatened by oppressive government regulation. Rather, political action by gun rights activists in the last few decades has rolled back gun restrictions that began in the 1780s.

Spitzer writes: “The common notions that gun laws are largely a function of modern, industrial (or post-industrial) America, that gun laws are incompatible with American history and its practices or values, and that gun laws fundamentally collide with our legal traditions or individual rights, are all patently false.”

Early gun laws were comprehensive, ubiquitous, and extensive. Taken together, they covered every conceivable dimension of gun acquisition, sale, possession, transport, and use, including deprivation of use through outright confiscation. … In all of this lawmaking, there is no hint that these laws infringed on anything related to any ‘right to bear arms.’

Spitzer counters the Hollywood version of the Wild West, showing that the kinds of high noon gun fights glamourized in hundreds of movies and dozens of TV series simply didn’t happen.

Carry restriction laws were widely enacted, spanning the entire historical period under examination, but proliferated in the early 1800s, and then exploded in numbers during the post-Civil War period.

The Second Amendment guarantees individual gun ownership to ensure that an oppressed citizenry always will have the power to oppose an evil government.

Spitzer:

The Constitution specifically and explicitly gives the national government the power to suppress by force anything even vaguely resembling rebellion. Rebellion is by constitutional definition an act of treason against the United States. The militias mentioned … are thus to be used to suppress, not cause, rebellion or insurrection.

Despite the present Supreme Court’s assertion that there is a constitutional guarantee of individual gun rights, no other court, and no federal or state law, has previously held so.

Spitzer writes that “firearms rules are as American as gun ownership.”

Examining the history, Spitzer shows that “the debate during the First Congress in 1789 (when the amendment was proposed, debated, revised, and passed) pertained to military/militia/national defense matters. At no time was there any debate or discussion saying or suggesting that the amendment had anything to do with a personal right to guns aside from militia service.”

So much for the conservative, “originalist” argument that the only way to apply the Constitution today is to restrict ourselves to what the framers intended at the time that the document was written. As Spitzer points out, “From the time of its writing in 1789 through the end of the twentieth century, the Second Amendment was interpreted as protecting a right to bear arms only in connection with … militia service.”

This militia-based understanding was confirmed by the Supreme Court most notably in an 1886 case (Presser v.Illinois 13 ) and a 1939 case (U.S.v.Miller 14 ), and in nearly fifty lower federal court cases handed down from the 1940s through the beginning of this century. 15 In fact, no gun law had been declared unconstitutional as a violation of the Second Amendment until what became the Heller case came along [in 2008].

There’s much more in Guns across America, from an examination of assault weapon bans to differences in historical and current state gun laws, most tellingly so-called “Stand Your Ground” laws, which Spitzer shows are a new (and IMO heinous) twist on the ancient right to self-defense.

As Spitzer asks in a chapter title, “How Did We Get from Self-Defense to Shoot First?” He makes his case against these “gun rights” with the same rigourous appeal to data over rhetoric that characterized the entire book:

Two researchers from Texas A&M University drew on FBI Uniform Crime Report data from the U.S. Department of Justice to examine the effects of newly enacted stand your ground laws. Their analysis of the period from 2000 to 2010 found no evidence that such laws deterred crimes, including burglary, robbery, or aggravated assault. They did, however, find an increase in the homicide rate of about 8 percent (about 600 additional homicides per year) in states with the new stand your ground laws, and an approximate increase in justifiable homicides of between 17-50 percent, leading them to conclude that ‘a primary consequence of castle doctrine laws [when applied to public places] is to increase homicide by a statistically and economically significant’ rate.

Of course, race is an unavoidable factor in the application of these laws. Spitzer reports “significant racial differences in the adjudication of stand your ground laws.”

In stand your ground states, the justifiable rates for black on black, black on white, and white on white killings were within one to two percent of each other when compared with non-stand your ground states. But when the killer was white and the victim black, the rate rose to almost 17 percent.

Spitzer argues that the expansion of “stand your ground” laws “question[s] the authority of the state [and] seek[s] to appropriate some of that authority by placing it directly into the hands of armed citizens, yet without any coherent, much less persuasive evidence that such a transfer is necessary or beneficial.”

This review highlights just a small sample of the thorough research and cogent argument that makes Guns across America such a needed addition to the debate over “gun rights” in the United States.

News reports today trumpet the sequencing of the complete genome of the woolly mammoth. This accomplishment brings science one step closer to the potential “revival” of this extinct species.

I’m particularly interested in this topic, as I’ve recently finished reading Beth Shapiro’s newly-published How to Clone a Mammoth: The Science of De-extinction.

Shapiro’s book is timely not just for her insights into the science, as an active “revival” researcher, but also for the many cautions and moral issues that she identifies. Sometimes, the thrill of the scientific chase makes “can do!” threaten to overwhelm “should do?”

The new study, from Sweden, says nothing about reviving the mammoth. Its focus is on comparisons of genetic deterioration in a dwindling population, using the genome data to compare an older Siberian specimen (about 44,000 years old) to a Wrangel Island specimen that lived at the very end of the mammoth line (about 4,000 years ago).

But the complete genome sequences from these two specimens bring species revival tantalizingly closer. As Shapiro points out in her book, until now only shorter fragments of mammoth DNA had been sequenced.

So, now that we have the mammoth genome, the rest is easy, right?

Shapiro outlines all of the other challenges of species revival in interesting detail, arriving at the short answer, “No, not easy.” But possible? And, if possible, why not?

Here is where Shapiro’s book rises above the “merely” scientific and becomes a much more important consideration of the issues that should caution enthusiastic groups like the eager potential revivers of the Long Now group.

How to Clone a Mammoth starts with a clear statement that, in Shapiro’s view, there is no point in bringing back an extinct species to create scientific curiosities, zoo animals, or mammoth theme parks: “What is the point, after all, of bringing a species back from the dead if it is not to reestablish a wild population?”

When I imagine a successful de-extinction, I don’t imagine an Asian elephant giving birth in captivity to a slightly hairier elephant under the close scrutiny of veterinarians and excited (and quite possibly mad) scientists. I don’t imagine the spectacle of this exotic creature in a zoo enclosure, on display for the gawking eyes of children who’d doubtless prefer to see a T. rex or Archaeopteryx anyway. What I do imagine is the perfect arctic scene, where mammoth families graze the steppe tundra, sharing the frozen landscape with herds of bison, horses, and reindeer—a landscape in which mammoths are free to roam, rut, and reproduce without the need of human intervention and without fear of re-extinction. This—building on the successful creation of one individual to produce and eventually release entire populations into the wild— constitutes the second phase of de-extinction. In my mind, deextinction cannot be successful without this second phase.

Once you’ve decided that you will, indeed, bring a species back from extinction, how do you decide which one to revive? Should we choose the species that will be the easiest to bring back? The most awe-inspiring? The most likely to draw attention, perhaps motivating further investment into the technology? Or should we focus on those species whose de-extinction is clearly scientifically justifiable? And, if the latter, what does that mean exactly? Finally, and just as importantly, who is the “we” that gets to decide?

Shapiro argues that there must be a “compelling reason” to bring a species back. We’ll need someplace for them to live if we’re going to establish a wild population, and that means careful consideration of the “new” animal’s impact on the existing ecosystem into which it is to be introduced.

What about the mechanics? After all, we can’t just zap a gene sequence and, one puff of smoke later, say hello to Woolly Bully, the first Mammoth II. How much you think a living elephant would relish carrying and giving birth to a baby from a different, much larger species? Or do we not care about that, being willing to sacrifice a few elephant females for the good of the cause?

Shapiro discusses the ongoing project to “deextinct” the auroch. The “back-breeding” team is not trying to bring back an actual auroch; rather, they hope to introduce enough auroch DNA into existing cattle populations to “ resurrect a phenotype that can do in that environment what the auroch used to do…. something similar in function but not necessarily identical in form.”

In my mind, it is this ecological resurrection, and not species resurrection, that is the real value of de-extinction. We should think of de-extinction not in terms of which life form we will bring back, but what ecological interactions we would like to see restored.

Another unknown that Shapiro considers is the effect of epigenetic changes. We simply can’t predict “how much of looking and acting like a mammoth is due to having a mammoth genome, and how much of it is due to living life in the steppe tundra.”

And it’s life in the Siberian tundra that Shapiro insists should be the goal of any attempt to revive the woolly mammoth.

Some advocates for mammoth de-extinction probably don’t care what ecological role unextinct mammoths might play on the Siberian tundra. Some probably don’t even care if they ever make it to the Siberian tundra, as long as they make it to a zoo or a park where they can be observed and possibly ridden. I, however, and others including George Church and Sergey Zimov, care very much about how unextinct mammoths—or, more correctly, genetically engineered Asian elephants—might change the Siberian tundra. In fact, their potential to invigorate the Siberian tundra is precisely why we are motivated to work on this project.

Shapiro devotes a chapter titled “Should We?” to many of the more serious objections that have been raised against the entire idea of reintroducing extinct species.

First, and easiest to refute, is the idea that de-extinction might revive dangerous pathogens. The short answer: “No.” Pathogens don’t set up house in DNA, and even if some ancient virus were found in incidental blood or tissue samples, the genetic material inside it will be too degraded to “revive.”

Another objection is that we should prioritize conservation of species that are still alive. Shapiro argues that there is little, if any, overlap in funding that goes to conservation and the much smaller amount that supports revival efforts. Money that could save Siberian tigers simply is not being spent on speculative reanimation of Siberian mammoths.

“Unextinct speices have nowhere to go.” Yes, Shapiro admits,“finding sufficient amounts of suitable habitat will certainly present a challenge for some de-extinction projects.” Mammoths need a lot of room. Shapiro counters that public interest in the problems of finding habitats for “returning” animals may spur activism in species conservation and ecosystem enhancements in general. That would be a good thing.

Almost the same objection is concern about the impact of releasing de-extinct species on existing ecosystems. Shapiro spends a lot of time on this objection, acknowledging that we can’t know every consequence in advance. However, while “reintroducing the extinct species may upset the existing dynamics within that ecosystem,” Shapiro rejects the idea that that ecosystem will be “destroyed.” Changed, maybe changed back, but not “destroyed.” One unappetizing but possible way to restore the existing ecosystem if the changes introduced by de-extinction are unacceptable would be to “re-extinct” the revived species. (This is also a good reason to restore only large, slower-breeding animals!)

Shapiro writes that “conservation strategies can be thought of as a continuum between entirely managed ecosystems (think “gardening”) and allowing nature to fend for itself (think “preserving”).”

Purely preservationist strategies are, however, also risky. What if sufficient habitat can’t be preserved? What if species do not reestablish populations in the habitat that is preserved? Few habitats have avoided completely the effects of human population growth, suggesting that, at some level, intervention has already occurred. Further intervention may be required simply to reduce the damage that has already been done.

Shapiro deals just as fairly with other objections before sounding her final, positive note:

De-extinction is a process that allows us to actively create a future that is really better than today, not just one that is less bad than what we anticipate.

Thanks to both her caution and her enthusiasm, Shapiro has produced a highly-readable and quite sensible look at new technical and ethical territory.

Much more than a mere catalogue of horrors, Scull’s fine book examines a neglected entry point into the unended conflict between reason and emotion, science and superstition.

Madness in Civilization traces the ancient debate between the natural and the supernatural, as evidenced by both the conception and the treatment of “madness” and, more recently, “mental illness.” The name change itself is part of the history Scull elaborates.

Perhaps most poignant are the later chapters, when contemporary and near-contemporary physicians and scientists — who should know better, we believe — fare little better than did medieval exorcists. Shock treatments, experimental drug therapies, involuntary lobotomies, and the wholesale, ideology and budget driven disappearance of public treatment facilities have left too many vulnerable people to wander the streets, or languish in prisons. We may be more modern, but we’re not always more enlightened.

Richly detailed and fully researched, Madness in Civilization is an absorbing and informative book.

What will TV be like after TV? Post-TV: Piracy, Cord-Cutting, and the Future of Television is a timely examination of the changing habits of viewers who are streaming and downloading more as they watch commercial TV less.

On a deeper level, Strangelove argues, the struggle for control of television content, like the related evolution of the ways that we listen to music and watch movies, is a clash of worldviews. On one hand, traditional providers of television content represent market values; on the other, the individual choices enjoyed by the digitally connected could become part of a wider rejection of corporate control of popular culture.

Television is the very engine of capitalist societies; it shapes voter habits and influences public policy, consumer values, and our perception of everyday reality. What is at stake with the rise of a type of television system that is not dominated by the commercial production of programming but one wherein multiple modes of production coexist within reach of the same audiences?

Strangelove works his way through the major points of conflict in the battle for television, showing that everything from anti-piracy efforts to the means of production is an arena in which what he derisively calls “20th Century television” is frantically defending its formerly-exclusive turf against a loosely-organized army of hackers and free-content foot soldiers.

The result is a book that is filled with detail yet always interesting. Never merely an academic survey, Post-TV is the engaging story of one ongoing fight for control of our culture.

Her work there as an NPR journalist, an adviser to American government and military leaders striving to “liberate” and “democratize” the country, and as an NGO activist has been profoundly informed by her deep knowledge of the historical “rules” for princes written by sources as diverse as Machiavelli and the medieval Islamic scholar Nizam al-Mulk.

Her conclusion, consistent with the advice of these classic books, is that no state is secure if its people are oppressed by corrupt leaders and local officials.

In great detail, in Thieves of State: Why Corruption Threatens World Security, Chayes describes two destructive systems: the corruption of the local government and the often-unintentional collusion of the liberators and occupiers.

Time and again U.S. officials are blindsided by major developments in countries where they work. Too often they are insensible to the perspectives and aspirations of populations. Focused on levers to pull, on people who “get things done,” they overlook or help enable networks that are bent on power and private enrichment and are structured to maximize both, at the expense of the citizenry. And they formulate reasons why doing so is, unfortunately, necessary to the U.S. national interest.

One of the book’s greatest strengths is its focus on the ground-level mendacity that too often thwarts the best of intentions. Where many other political analyses live in the abstract, Chayes’s work details the ways that ordinary citizens, the very population that the occupation wishes to help, are not only oppressed but also identify their “saviours” with that oppression.

One early example is simple but powerfully revealing. The American military gives a bridge-repair contract to a local elder. The elder skims off “his” portion, then passes the contract down to a contractor who takes “his” own piece before subcontracting the work to someone who does the same before the project is given to the local workers who take their cut before they actually do the repair. If each level takes 20% of the available money, just these four dilutions leave less than half of the original funds. The work is necessarily shoddy, and the local people who are left with a badly-repaired bridge look on helplessly as several levels of local officials use their slices of the pie to buy fancy new cars to drive over the “fixed” bridge. And since the Americans started the whole thing, it’s not hard to believe that they were in on the scam from the beginning. Of such small injustices, Chayes argues, are new insurgents and terrorists created.

How are the “liberators” responsible? By dealing with only government officials and not the locals directly, they facilitate the corruption.

We communicated almost exclusively with government officials, delivered development resources through their agents, hired their relatives and cronies, bought gravel and T-walls and gasoline and intelligence from them, and often used their armed thugs—known as private security companies—to protect our convoys.

From Afghanistan, Chayes moves on to the Arab Spring and other corrupt governments today, then to an extended look at possible solutions from chief-of-state leadership, to greater intelligence emphasis on unveiling and rooting out corruption, to changes in an international banking system that makes hiding corruption profits too easy, to stricter control of aid projects and the local contractors who carry them out.

Without these steps, Chayes warns – as did Machiavelli, Nizam al-Mulk, and all of the others – no regime is secure, no state is stable. Oppress any people enough, and they will rise up.

From the thirteen American colonies to the have-nots of Afghanistan, rebellion looks better than continued submission.

If you haven’t been paying attention lately, the traditional conservation movement is being challenged by a new species of “environmentalist” with the goal of reframing conservation efforts by replacing “conserve” with “manage.”

The core of this new, doubly “neo-con” approach is the idea that the only way that we can motivate the level of political and financial support needed for conservation is to give up on trying to save the earth, the animals, the plants, or the climate because they’re intrinsically worthwhile or valuable. Instead, their argument goes, it’s only when we frame the struggle for survival in terms of entirely human goals and needs that success will be possible.

Protecting the Wild is an effort by the Foundation for Deep Ecology to contest the new approach.

One of the great challenges to be faced by conservationists in the future will be that of clarifying in the public mind the distinction between ecosystem services and biodiversity protection.

The great threat in the neo-cons’ argument is that their approach seems to be a “win-win,” with the managed conservation of natural areas of direct use to us cast as an efficient and sufficient protection of nature. The authors who collaborated to produce Protecting the Wild reject this tactic, insisting that “There is no alternative. Parks and other strictly protected areas are the answer.”

One counter to the management tactic is the present state of “mixed” areas, where natural “preserves” and human economies overlap. Typically, while animal, plant, and water resources that benefit people are managed for economic gain, resources that don’t benefit us, or even actively compete with us, are massively reduced or completely eliminated. This is the usual fate of an area’s top predators. Tigers, lions, and wolves are hunted because they threaten our livestock, or even stalk us directly when given a chance. Others, like sharks, are hunted because we fear them or because they have something we want (shark fin soup, anyone?)

An ecosystem without its top predators is an unbalanced interaction, with often catastrophic if often unanticipated consequences.

…the natural state of the trophic cascade with top carnivores present is what stabilizes ecosystems. Interfere with the interaction chain, predator-herbivore-plant or predator-mesopredator-small prey animal, and ecological impoverishment is certain to ensue.

The neo-cons’ approach to nature is entirely anthrocentric. Ours is an “extraction- and use-focused culture, which has viewed the landscape almost exclusively through the lens of economic possibility: ‘How can I profit from this place? Can I log it, or mine it, or graze it? How can I make it my garden?’”

One perhaps unexpected rejection of traditional conservation comes from the postmodernist left, where some argue that excluding large natural areas from human development is a benighted Enlightenment holdover. (The idea that developing countries should be allowed their “turn” to pollute their economies into the post-industrial world by exempting them from environmental controls is a similar argument.)

The counter: “The movement’s foremost tool—protected areas—rejects a colonialist, imperialist attitude toward the living Earth. The designation of protected areas is an expression of humility about the limits of human knowledge and a gesture of respect toward our fellow creatures, allowing them to flourish in their homes without fear of persecution.”

Protecting the Wild asks: “Given this context, should conservation give up on its core commitment of stopping anthropogenic extinctions and instead focus on humanized, managed landscapes intended to produce “ecological services” for people?”

The rest of the book gives the answer, which is a firm “No.”

The days of protecting wild nature are not, and should not, be in the past. A bolder, resurgent conservation movement need not settle for an agenda based on trying to ameliorate the effects of humanity’s numbers and overconsumption. Rather, it might sound a clarion call for a peace treaty between humans and nature, a cease-fire in industrial humanity’s war on wild nature.

And,

The fundamental choice for our species is whether we will continue striving to be the planetary manager, the gardener-in-chief, or become a respectful member in the community of life. With every action to reassert the dominion of beauty, diversity, and wildness over the Earth—each hectare protected, each habitat secured—we tug the universe a bit more toward justice.

After a number of reiterations of this core philosophy by a cadre of noted conservationists, Protecting the Wild convincingly outlines the problems with a management approach and the need for a redoubled effort at true natural conservation, most effectively by devoting most of its chapters to detailed, specific examples of natural areas around the world. Some are success stories, others are cautionary.

This level of detail raises the argument well above the “merely” philosophical or ethical and provides readers with enough material to turn fence-sitters into conservationists.